The donkey is a key character, albeit increasingly marginalized, in the story. Once revered, the animal has been mocked for so long that the word “donkey” means “stupid.” Donkeys and donkey work are essential to people’s livelihoods in developing countries, but elsewhere donkeys have all but disappeared.
Compared to horses and dogs, donkeys have received relatively little attention from researchers.
However, the donkeys are the star of an important new genetic study published in the journal Science.
Researchers from 37 laboratories around the world analyzed the genomes of 207 modern donkeys in 31 countries. They also sequenced DNA from the skeletons of 31 ancestral donkeys, some dating back 4,500 years.
Scholars had previously identified three possible centers of domestication, in the Near East, northeast Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula. But the team concluded that donkeys were domesticated only once, around 5000 BC, when herders in the Horn of Africa and present-day Kenya began to tame wild asses. That date is some 400 years before the earliest archaeological evidence of domesticated donkeys from El Omari, near Cairo, and nearly three millennia before horses were first harnessed.
The period coincided with one in which the Sahara became larger and more arid. Donkeys are tolerant of water deprivation, which has led Ludovic Orlando, director of the Toulouse Center for Anthropobiology and Genomics in France, and author of the article, to speculate that they became an indispensable means of transportation for herders. .
From that point of origin, donkeys were traded northwest to present-day Sudan and then to Egypt, leaving Africa about 5,000 years ago and reaching Asia and Europe about 500 years later.
The donkey assumed a mythical and religious dimension for our ancestors.
During the Bronze Age, from 3300 BC to 1200 BC. C., donkeys were sometimes buried with humans, indicating a bestowal of honor on both parties.
At an archaeological site on the grounds of a Roman villa in the French town of Boinville-en-Woëvre, 280 kilometers east of Paris, researchers found what appears to have been a donkey breeding center, where West African donkeys they were mated with their European counterparts. The resulting pack animals measured 1.55 meters, or 15 hands, from ground to withers. The current standard is 1.30 meters, or 12 hands.
Orlando said the production of giant donkey bloodlines occurred at a time when mules, the sterile offspring of male donkeys and mares, were vital to the Roman economy and its military. The Romans probably preferred mules for their stamina, speed, and ability to carry massive loads, especially for the Army, which was arrayed over thousands of miles.
“When the Roman Empire collapsed, there was no incentive left for transportation over those long roads, and societies turned to more local economies,” Orlando said. “Then the donkey became more dominant and mules were hardly ever produced.”.
Twenty years ago at Abydos in southern Egypt, the skeletons of 10 donkeys, dating to 3100 BC, were unearthed from excavations outside the burial grounds of the early pharaohs. The bones showed wild and domestic characteristics, said Peter Mitchell, an archaeologist at Oxford who was not involved in the project, with damage to the vertebrae and joints consistent with transport.
The lucrative trade in donkey skins, a sprawling, largely unregulated and often illegal global industry, encourages intensive farming for skins, which are boiled to make ejiao, a jelly used primarily in traditional Chinese medicine.
“This obviously goes against animal welfare and poses a threat to local donkey populations and those who depend on the animal for their livelihood.Orlando said.
“If anything, our work reveals that our relationship with the animal goes back a long way,” he said. “This should help us realize the countless services they provided to humanity and hopefully make us feel grateful.”
By: FRANZ LIDZ
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6644982, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-04-05 00:20:08
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